Based on work initially published in 2013 on study design and ethics of clinical experimentation during public health outbreaks, and hosting an international conference with WHO in June 2014, Professor Edwards has been closely involved in ethics and social sciences work during epidemics ever since. Her original work was the only relevant reference used by the then WHO ad hoc group on ethics and study design convened during the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014, and has now been cited by following international training and guidance documents by WHO.
She mentored Dr Raji Tajudeen, Director of the National Institutes for Public Health at the African CDC through his year-long Chatham House Fellowship to develop a 'bottom-up' policy framework on ethics of research during epidemics for Africa. She is also leading the External Technical Committee on Social Sciences for the African CDC, and is a member of WHO GOARN-R social science group, and EC funded SoNAR-GLOBAL.
Since Covid emerged, she is a member of the Covid-Clinical Research Coalition Ethics Working Group as well as running research into the experience of healthcare workers across different contexts and countries, into the host range of the virus, risk mitigation and anthroponosis, and into the use of preclinical experiments for risk assessments in clinical trials and assessing therapeutic potential of and access to repurposed treatments.